127. Help or Interfere, Part I: Hx

A lot of RPGs give players the ability to have their characters help each other. What’s unique in Apocalypse World is that there is a dedicated stat for the purpose. Here’s the first sentence of the help or interfere move:

When you help or interfere with someone who’s making a roll, roll+Hx.

Before we look at the rest of the move, I’d like to spend some time talking about Hx and its role in the game. It’s a pretty neat thing to mechanize how well our characters understand/get/see through/grok one another, but it’s only neat if the game has a reason to do that, only neat if doing so is important to the game. In Apocalypse World, how well our characters get each other is central to the themes of community and of making something together of this mess of a world we’ve inherited.

The players first encounter Hx during character creation when they “do the Hx thing” (97). I’ve already talked about how cool “the Hx thing” is as it not only gives the players insight into how that character understands the people around them but that it also creates fiction that pre-dates the opening scene of the game about to be played. In answering Hx questions, players mark out relationships between the characters, define crucial color of the world the characters inhabit, and shape the play and fiction that will form the foundation of the game ahead. If Hx did nothing more, it would be awesome tech.

But it does so much more.

In Apocalypse World, there are three ways to gain XP: 1) roll a highlighted stat, 2) reset your character’s Hx with someone, and 3) gain it at the behest of a move. Let’s start with the second one.

The game rewards you with XP for your character’s growth and improvement every time you do something to increase their Hx enough to roll over to the next level of “getting someone” or decrease enough to roll down a level. The game doesn’t care if you’re improving your relationships or destroying them; it only cares that those relationships and understandings are changing significantly. We’ll look at how Hx changes during play itself in a moment, but the reliable way that Hx changes is from the end of session move that says that every player has to decidedwho knows their character better because of the happenings in that session and grant them a point a Hx. If you can’t find someone who knows them better, choose someone who knows them worse. Changing Hx at the end of the session is not optional - “Every player has to choose someone, no passing” (154). If you want to speed up your character’s progression, you’d best have your character interacting with the other characters in ways that change that relationship for the better or worse. As a player, then, you are encouraged by the rules to play your character in a way that builds or degrades that community in measurable ways.

Now let’s look at the first way to gain XP: highlighted stats. It’s no coincidence that highlighted stats are tied to Hx. Who gets to highlight your stats is determined by which player’s character your character understands best. That player then selects one of your stats so as to say, I’d like to see your character do these kinds of things in the upcoming session. Highlighting stats builds community at the table just as Hx stats measures community in the fiction. Our characters have to look out for each other, and the players likewise have to look out for (and be invested in) each other as players. Every time you have your character do the thing that the other player said she wanted to see, you get an XP for your character. The more you aim to please your fellow players in this way, the more you are rewarded. In this way, community at the player level is thematically connected to the community being created at the character level.

What about that last way to gain XP? Which moves tell you to gain XP? Yep, the moves that ask you as a player to make your character do what another player wants. Let someone seduce or manipulate your character, take an XP. The savvyhead’s oftener right move and the hocus’s insight move also result in XP as one player’s character influences another player’s character’s behavior. Like highlighted stats, these moves reward community at the player-level of play. And some character’s moves result in a change, not of XP, but of Hx scores, yeah? Do harm to another character, that other character gets plus one to their Hx stat with your character. The more harm done, the more insight gained. Heal another character, you get plus one to your Hx stat with the healed character. The more healing done, the more insight gained. And sex moves! Bring those characters together in moments of intimacy and watch the Hx stats swing in both directions. This is one of the reasons why sex moves are central to the game rather than a tacked on subsystem. Yeah, you can play without them and have a good time, but the game is about how these characters relate to one another and build a community together, and it does that more effectively and more powerfully when the sex moves are present.

Every element in the reward system is tied to the fictional development of community between characters and the real community created at the table between players.

That Hx is used as the basis for how well you can help or hinder another player is awesome in its own right. The more I get you, the better chance I have of anticipating what you will do or what you would want me to do. But if that’s all Hx did, it would be nothing more than clever, an amusing insight into human interaction at best. What I think is especially smart in this design is that using Hx as a stat in helping or interfering is a way to take advantage of something the game already wants to do.